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Category Archives: Mechwarrior

I’ve been on a bit of a Battletech kick lately, enjoying some of the older Technical Readouts and checking out the new ones as well. After reading this neat little nostalgia piece by Abe Sargent about your five favorite ‘mechs from the 3025 guide, I realized that I’m a bit of a mixed bag when it comes to my affection to the Battletech universe.

I was introduced to the game by the 3025 era and have a lot of nostalgia for it. TR 3025 is definitely the most read of the TRs for me – not surprising, given how chock-a-block it is with stories about the units.

However, the bulk of my play came a little later in the early Clan era – think TR 3050 and the Kerensky books. I’ll write more about my affection for the look and feel of those early Clan units in another post.

But…my strongest period of Battletech-related play is really those years in grad school when I played Mechwarrior: Dark Age. I’m confident I played more Mechwarrior than I’ve ever played Classic Battletech. So I have huge affection for many of the units in Mechwarrior, as well as the look and feel of the game.

All of that brings me to this guy:

The Gyrfalcon, a “totem ‘mech” for Clan Jade Falcon.

This is where I find the compare/contrast between Classic Battletech and Mechwarrior kind of fun. Pretty much everything that appeared in Mechwarrior has been statted out for Battletech as well. The Gyrfalcon’s stats appear in Battletech: Technical Readout: 3145 The Clans (that is an unwieldy title).

In Mechwarrior, Gyrfalcons were amazing packets of long-range, high-endurance death. They were highly mobile, outranged most other ‘mechs, and like all the Jade Falcon “winged” totem ‘mechs, could cool like nothing else. The upshot was that while every other ‘mech had to really give it a rest every few turns, you could race a Gyrfalcon around with minimal downtime.

In short, they were brutal.

In Battletech, the Gyrfalcon is fast enough and cools better than average, but it just doesn’t feel like it would be as mobile (or as brutal) as the Mechwarrior Gyrfalcons were. Are LB-2Xs and ER Large Lasers going to rack up as much harm in Battletech as the Gyrfalcon’s guns did in Mechwarrior?

…and, of course, this is the point. They’re just very different games. The games model key factors (like heat and maneuverability) differently, so at the end of the day some units just won’t translate over well. That said, I haven’t actually played Battletech with these guys yet, so who knows?

Just some musings as I look through Technical Readouts published over the past three decades or so.